It was with a certain pleasure I read John Chen’s excellent article, “The Simple Solution To The Technology Trust Crisis” and its suggestions as to how to resolve the issue that people don’t trust the technology that they seem to rely on every day. He suggests that we must own our data and be allowed to be responsible for the monetization or non-monetization of our data, our choices and by extension ourselves, something we have been saying here. It got me thinking of having drinks with a lovely girl from South Africa while in college. She was African and delighted in telling me how in Apartheid South Africa, I would be thought of as less than white, with my olive skin and dark curly hair, that I would fall somewhere on the scale of quadroon, or octoroon. The dictionary reminds that quadroon refers to one who In the 19th century was a person who was one-quarter black and three-quarters white. In other words, a quadroon had one grandparent of African descent. The dictionary goes on to declare that the term is deeply offensive and obsolete.
While that is a charming thought, perhaps the future will see a return of that type of classification for our relation to our digital assets, perhaps we will allow the big tech companies to own our digital personality- digital slaves. Perhaps we will find this term useful to declare how much of ourselves belongs to us and how much is owned by Google, Facebook or Amazon. Author Kashmir Hill, tried to remove herself from the snarl of big tech only to find that she was unable to live without its convenience. Perhaps we are already fast asleep, and the oozy weeds about us twist as we give the only power have, the power to make choices for ourselves, away. Maybe, for us to even think of ourselves as complete owners of our data, our choices and by extension ourselves is only make-believe.